Re: The Sciences of the Artificial applied to Biology

On Fri, 11 Jul 2025 16:25:12 -0000 (UTC), Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com> wrote:

On Fri, 11 Jul 2025 11:49:03 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:
 

On 2025-07-10 14:04, john larkin wrote:

On Wed, 09 Jul 2025 19:38:41 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net>
wrote:
 

I forgot to mention that he Sciences of the Artificial digs deep into
why living things (even microscopic ones) have distinct organs and
often components within such organs, versus the organism being a mass
of tissue that somehow does everything.  The driver is efficiency and
simplicity.
 
This assumes that life has already emerged in some unspecified way,
and goes from there.  This is a different approach than Dawkin's
Blind-Watchmaker arguments.
 
Joe
 
 
Ref:  "Simon_Herbert_A_The_Sciences_of_the_Artificial_3rd_ed" - The
Architecture of Complexity.  New copies are available from MIT Press.

 
Even single-cell critters have levels of intelligence. Some people
suggest some level of consciousness.
 
The book sounds cool.
 
Dawkins says he is an atheist above anything else. So he naturally
hides from anything that's not primitive neo-Darwinism.
 

 
That's just moving the goal posts.  One gets people nowadays talking
about different people's gut biomes 'communicating' with each other.  If
all they mean is that there's some poorly-qnantified mauual influence,
okay, but I get the impression they often mean more than that.
 
I think it's unhelpful to conflate mere mutual influence with
intelligence---even calling it "information exchange" imports the idea
of meaning, which requires actual intelligence.

Lots of things exchange information but are not intelligent or
conscious.  A classic biological example is a virus infecting a
critter by injecting some well-crafted bits of DNA or RNA into the
victim critter.  Another example is microscopic organisms exchanging
DNA or RNA, often as plasmids.  No brain required.

Cheers
 
Phil Hobbs

 
Even single-cell critters (including our own cells) have
extraordinarily complex behavior. And nobody understands how our
brains work.
 
What I'm suggesting is that we not exclude thinking about possible
biological mechanisms for theological reasons.
 
What's your definition of "actual intelligence" ?  I know that most of
what I do (and invent) is done unconsiously.
 
Is an oyster intelligent?

Maybe it's just the wrong question.  An oyster certainly has a nervous
system and reacts to its environment  sometimes in complex ways.  But
it does not appear to be conscious.

Nobody has found a universally agreed definition of conscious, but
people know it when they see it, and generally agree on the degree to
which various critters have it

 
 
 

>
An intelligent being, properly speaking, is one with a *nous*. 

This definition mixes common sense and agency; a better term is
needed.

Joe